When current president of Mexico Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) was the mayor of Mexico City in the early 2000s, he believed that Seguro Popular was “neither safe nor popular,” a common leftist criticism of the program at the time. AMLO’s main criticisms of Seguro Popular were incomplete coverage of the population, incomplete coverage of services, not enough reduction of out-of-pocket spending, widespread corruption, and overall failure to improve the well-being of citizens by failing to improve health conditions and failing to reduce poverty (Reich 2020).

 

So, when AMLO became president of Mexico in 2018, he envisioned a new healthcare system based on three core ideas: universality, free services, and anti-corruption. In January 2020, this new healthcare system manifested in the Instituto de Salud para el Bienestar, or INSABI for short (Reich 2020).